Here’s one way to get kids excited about programming: a "robot garden" with dozens of fast-changing LED lights and more than 100 origami robots that can crawl, swim, and blossom like flowers. Read more.

When MIT senior Sheldon Trotman walks into any room, he almost instinctively looks for inefficiencies. The electrical engineering and computer science major is bent on streamlining our world, and has already founded several small companies that aim to do so. Read more.

Professor Vladimir Bulovic holds the Fariborz Maseeh Chair in Emerging Technology at MIT, heads the MIT.nano project, and co-leads the MIT Innovation Initiative. His ONE Lab has been a hotbed of scientific discovery... Read more.

Erna Viterbi, a warm and gracious philanthropist who with her husband, Qualcomm co-founder Andrew ’56, SM ’57, gave generously to MIT and a variety of other institutions, died Feb. 17 in San Diego. At MIT, the Viterbis established endowed professorships and fellowships for graduate students in the departments of electrical engineering and computer science and biological engineering. Four faculty members and more than 40 students on campus have benefited directly from their generosity. Read more.

This week, at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ (IEEE's) International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC), the group of Anantha Chandrakasan, EECS Department Head and the Joseph F. and Nancy P. Keithley Professor in Electrical Engineering at MIT, will present a new transmitter design that reduces power leakage when transmitters are idle — greatly extending battery life and ultimately enabling the potential for the transmission of data needed for the "Internet of things". Read more.

On February 19th, the birthday of Nicolaus Copernicus, Professor James G. Fujimoto was awarded the Honorary Doctorate Degree at the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Poland. Professor Fujimoto was awarded the University’s highest academic distinction, Doctor Honoris Causa. Read more.

Mapping the human genome, accomplished a decade ago, was heralded for laying the foundation for understanding genetic variation and links to a wide range of diseases. But genes can be switched on and off by many chemical modifications, aka "epigenetic marks." Now Manolis Kellis, EECS professor and member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab and the Broad Institute has led an NIH group that has created a similar map of the human epigenome. This work will lead to a global map towards understanding fundamental developmental and disease processes in humans. Read more.

Our susceptibility to disease depends both on the genes that we inherit from our parents and on our lifetime experiences. These two components — nature and nurture — seem to affect very different processes in the context of Alzheimer's disease, according to a new study published today in the journal Nature. Read more.

In the quest for improving the speed and efficiency of multicore chips, EECS Assistant Professor Daniel Sanchez and graduate student Nathan Beckmann designed a system that moves data around multicore chips' memory banks — improving execution by 18 percent on average while increasing energy efficiency as well. They won an award for this work in 2013. Now.. Read more.

Kateeva, a company co-founded by EECS graduate Conor Madigan SM ’02 PhD ’06, now CEO and Vladimir Bulovic, the Fariborz Maseeh Professor of Emerging Technology in EECS and co-founder and now scientific advisor is featured by the MIT News for its promising technologies to mass produce large-screen, flexible OLED. Read more.

Professor Rob Miller and members of the User Interface Design Group at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have devised a system that uses crowd-sourcing to annotate instructional videos for improved learning. Read more.

Start6 classes are over, but it is still well remembered by all involved and present — including Dennis Keohane, tech writer for the Boston Globe's Beta Boston. Keohane took in most of the classes for two weeks and a day with full opportunity to talk with the speakers and students and visitors. Read more.

In 2008, the World Health Organization announced a global effort to eradicate malaria, which kills about 800,000 people every year. As part of that goal, scientists are trying to develop new drugs that target the malaria parasite during the stage when it infects the human liver — crucial because some strains of malaria can lie dormant in the liver for several years before flaring up. Read more.

Five members of the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department of a total of eight MIT faculty have been elected to the National Academy of Engineering including Hari Balakrishnan, Sangeeta Bhatia, Anantha Chandrakasan, L. Rafael Reif and Daniela Rus. Read more.

A new joint class, Elections and Voting Technology (6.S897 and 17.S952) had students from Political Science and EECS examining both the technical and political complexities of elections. The class was taught jointly by Prof. Charles Stewart III of Political Science and Prof. Ron Rivest of EECS. Read more.

In building multicore chips, a common inefficiency arises with the addition of more than eight cores. EECS professor Nir Shavit, principal investigator in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL), a former student now at Microsoft Research and several EECS graduate students have analyzed data structures called priority codes and dodged logjams using skip code. Read more.

Dirk Englund and his team in the Quantum Photonics Laboratory have collaborated with colleagues at Brookhaven National Laboratory and an outside company to create a new technique to extend quantum-secured communication. Using nitrogen atoms embedded in synthetic diamond the researchers have trapped qubits that can transfer photons extending the superposition time of these qubits a hundredfold — ultimately leading toward practical quantum computing. Read more.

MIT’s next generation of entrepreneurs is getting a leg up on the competition thanks to Start6, an innovative class offered Jan. 12 through 27 by the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), which teaches students what’s needed to launch and run a successful startup business. Read more.

Two EECS Department faculty Jesus del Alamo and Rajeev Ram are recipients of Bose Grants — out of five MIT professors selected for research projects that are high-risk yet potentially having significant impact. The grants are given in memory of Amar Bose, electrical engineering professor, who taught in EECS and founded the Bose Corporation. Read more.

Madrid-MIT M+Visión Team wins 2015 Singapore Challenge. Luca Giancardo, PhD and the neuroQWERTY team awarded $100,000 for the best proposal to help elderly to “Age in Place” with their technology. Read more.

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science senior Daniel Kang has won the Churchill Scholarship. He is the 12th MIT student since the scholarship was established in 1963 to win this honor for which he will continue his graduate studies at Cambridge University. Read more.